The Research On The Integration Of Comparative Advantage Of China’s Vegetables And Its Trade Structure

Vegetables industry has become the second largest one in the planting industry in China, only after food industry. It not only meets the market of domestic consumption demand but also has become the world’s largest "vegetable basket" along with growing rapidly foreign trade. Nowadays, with the increasing vegetables trade all over the world, the degree of self-sufficiency continues to decline and cannot meet the growing demand for vegetables in developed countries, which has brought great opportunities for China as the world’s largest food basket to export vegetables. However, China’s export of vegetables is mainly by low prices as a competitive advantage for a long time, and now is confronted with some new problems because of the changes of China’s economic situation and the international trade environment. Facing opportunities and challenges, China needs to give full play to its own trade advantages for further development of vegetable trade. Therefore, the research on the integration of the dynamic comparative advantage of China’s vegetables and its trade structure, using the principle of comparative advantage to adjust the vegetables production and trade structure timely, is of great practical significance to guide the sustainable and healthy development of vegetable industry optimize the trade pattern of vegetables and promote international competitiveness of China’s vegetables.Study on the integration of the dynamic comparative advantage of China’s vegetables and its trade structure is rare and also necessitates more researches. This research attempts to conduct any initial attempt to the issue. The paper is aimed to illustrate the characteristics and efficiency of integration of the dynamic comparative advantage of China’s vegetables and its trade structure.On the basis of dynamic comparative advantage theory at home and abroad and current researches on trade structure and trade advantages of China’s vegetable industry, the paper illustrates the characteristics of the dynamic comparative advantage of overall trade of China’s vegetables, as well as quartile items trade of different product categories. As for methodology, the paper adopts visual statistics approaches, including the statistical analysis method, non-parametric kernel density estimation, scatter plots, Lorenz curves, to depict the dynamic characteristics of comparative advantage. Combined with dynamic characteristics of comparative advantage, the paper makes the analysis of general integration characteristics of trade structure and the dynamic comparative advantage with schedule method as well as consolidation trend of specific items of China’s major import and export vegetables with the two-dimensional analytical framework composed by RSCA coefficient and TSC index. The further study of the efficiency of integration by using the principle of comparative advantage to adjust the vegetables production and trade structure, which is compared with the world demand of import vegetables, is also discussed with scatter diagrams named the trade pattern and world demand integration.The paper shows that comparative advantage of China’s vegetables is overall declined year by year, and the structure of the comparative advantage is stable in the short term with no obvious mobility while significant change in the long term.The proportion of imports rise along with the overall decline in comparative advantage of China’s vegetables, that is to say dynamic change of comparative advantage is consistent with adjustment pace of trade structure. Namely, the export ratio of vegetable products with comparative advantage is down accounted for a corresponding reduction in its comparative advantage, while the import ratio of vegetable products with comparative disadvantage rises and its trade specialization is increasing. Generally, the change of dynamic comparative advantage of China’s vegetables reflects adjustment of its production and trade structure. And compared with import demand of world’s vegetables, the efficiency of integration is rising.